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NCAA.com | April 30, 2019

NCAA bracket 2019: Printable March Madness bracket .PDF

Exploring the absurd odds of a perfect bracket

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Virginia defeated Texas Tech to become the 2019 NCAA men's basketball champion on Monday at the 2019 Final Four. Here is the updated NCAA bracket for the 2019 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, also known as March Madness.

NCAA Basketball Tournament Bracket

Regional sites in 2019 were Hartford CT, Salt Lake City UT, Des Moines IA, Jacksonville FL, Tulsa OK, Columbus OH, Columbia SC and San Jose CA. The Final Four and national title game are in Minneapolis. Here is information on how to get tickets.

How are March Madness teams selected?

There are two ways that a team can earn a bid to the NCAA tournament. The 32 Division I conferences all receive an automatic bid, which they each award to the team that wins the postseason conference tournament. Regardless of how a team performed during the regular season, if they are eligible for postseason play and win their conference tournament, they are selected to receive a bid to the NCAA tournament. These teams are known as automatic qualifiers.

The second avenue for an invitation is an at-large bid. The selection committee (more on them in a second) convenes on Selection Sunday, after all regular season and conference tournament games are played, and decides which 36 teams that are not automatic qualifiers have the pedigree to earn an invitation to the tournament.

What is the March Madness selection committee?

The 10-member NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Committee is responsible for selecting, seeding and bracketing the field for the NCAA Tournament. School and conference administrators are nominated by their conference, serve five-year terms and represent a cross-section of the Division I membership.

How do they decide which teams get an at-large bid?

There are a multitude of stats and rankings that the Selection Committee takes into account, but there is no set formula that determines whether a team receives an at-large bid or not.

What's this new thing called the NCAA evaluation tool?

The NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET, is a tool for the committee to evaluate the strength of individual teams. It replaces the RPI and was approved after months of consultation with the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, the National Association of Basketball Coaches, top basketball analytics experts and Google Cloud Professional Services. It includes game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin (capped at 10 points per game), and net offensive and defensive efficiency.

What is the importance of seeding in March Madness?

The men’s college basketball tournament is made up of 68 teams. On Selection Sunday, before any tournament game is played, those teams are ranked 1 through 68 by the Selection Committee, with the best team in college basketball — based on regular season and conference tournament performance — sitting at No. 1. Four of those teams are eliminated in the opening round of the tournament (known as the First Four), leaving us with a field of 64 for the first round.

Those 64 teams are split into four regions of 16 teams each, with each team being ranked 1 through 16. That ranking is the team’s seed.

In order to reward better teams, first-round matchups are determined by pitting the top team in the region against the bottom team (No. 1 vs. No. 16). Then the next highest vs. the next lowest (No. 2 vs. No. 15), and so on. In theory, this means that the 1 seeds have the easiest opening matchup to win in the bracket.

When is the NCAA national championship game?

A champion will be crowned in the NCAA national championship game April 8 in Minneapolis. Semifinals games will be played two days before on Saturday, April 6, when the winners of each regional face off for a chance to play in the championship game.

What is a Cinderella?

Much like the titular character from the fairy tale, a Cinderella team is one that is much more successful than expected. Examples in March would be Villanova’s 1985 championship run, when the eighth-seeded Wildcats became the lowest seeded team to ever win the title, knocking off the heavy favorite Georgetown.